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Peter Diamandis: Silicon Valley’s Secrets Disclosed

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In this blog, I’m continuing my talk with entrepreneur Philip Rosedale, who explains the “secret sauce” of Silicon Valley — unveiling why Silicon Valley is such a hotbed of entrepreneurship.

I was interviewing Philip Rosedale, creator of the platforms Second Life and Coffee and Power, at Singularity University when he asked such a powerful and provocative question, that it launched me into a brand-new conversation with him. It is so important that I’m dedicating this entire blog to his answers.

His question: “Why does Silicon Valley have more successful software startups than anywhere else in the world? Are people just smarter here?”

After a short pause, Rosedale continued: “I don’t really believe that entrepreneurs are smarter in Silicon Valley, that we were genetically different or anything. San Francisco’s a tremendous melting pot of people from different areas. But I have been struck by the observation that in other countries the rate of success is much lower and that there’s a very low degree of sharing of ideas.”

“In Silicon Valley, you might think that people’s willingness and desire to exchange little pieces of information about what they’re doing carries more risk than benefit,” Rosedale said. “But if you added up their interactions overall, you’d see that there is a huge benefit to exchanging ideas. Ultimately it fuels more innovation and productivity here in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco, than anywhere else in the world,” he said.

In other parts of the world, Rosedale believes, “this lack of sharing might be driven simply by the fact that there aren’t enough people of the same ilk. There aren’t enough technical people running into each other in coffee shops colliding, if you will,” he said. “But culturally, just about everywhere other than in Northern California, people are very unwilling to share information with each other.”

“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Rosedale said. “As Second Life became famous, I got to travel around the world. Being an entrepreneur and an engineering person I was really interested in that fundamental question, which always struck me as a kind of funny cocktail-party conversation, since I don’t mind not pissing people off. When I was bored at cocktail parties, if I was in Europe, I’d bring out the question, ‘Why is it that you Europeans basically make no software and you’re all smarter than us?’ In Europe people are incredibly smart. They’re super effective. They can do all kinds of cool stuff. Why is that happening? And same thing in Asia,” he said.

“And then, moreover, in the United States, it’s not the whole United States that makes software — it’s just right here in Silicon Valley,” Rosedale said. “There’s really a lot more software that’s made here than anywhere else in the world. Why is that?”

Rosedale went on. “I had to give a talk at a great conference, called Big Omaha, which is a big get-together of entrepreneurs and mostly software tech people in Omaha, Nebraska. It gathers together people from that part of the country — Omaha, Des Moines — and I did this graph where I took Google Maps and I drew these circles, which were the area where 100,000 people lived superimposed on a map of each of these areas,” Rosedale said.

“I did Des Moines and I did Omaha and I did New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other places. On the map was a random scatter chart of red dots, and each red dot was a technical co-founder,” he said. “We got that data from LinkedIn. Now, LinkedIn has searches where you can basically ask how many people in an area say something on their résumé like ‘technical founder,’ ‘co-founder.’ So you can count how many technical founders are in that area per 100,000 residents. And guess what? In Omaha and in most cities in the United States, that number is somewhere between 20 and 30 per 100,000 people,” he said.

“In New York the number is 51, but in San Francisco the number is about 340. It’s the classic thing we all look forward together here: It’s an order of magnitude higher. And the scatter chart looks like a shotgun shell loaded onto a map of San Francisco,” Rosedale said. “The point I was trying to make with the map was that if you’re going to work on a software project, it’s going to fail. The probability of startups succeeding is 10 percent, unless pigs fly and some statistics are radically changed,” he said.

“Your project is going to fail with a 90 percent change of probability,” Rosedale said. “It’s going to fail in about one year. So now the question is: what happens next? The graph pretty well illustrates it visually. As I said, out there in Omaha you’re not going to live through the winter. You’re 24 years old. You saved up a little bit of money. You’re not going to make it. You’re going to have to go back and live at home or something, which is pretty depressing. In San Francisco, you’re going to get another job in two weeks because it’s an order of magnitude difference,” Rosedale said. “You’re going to walk into a bar in the Mission in San Francisco and you’re going to run into the person who’s either going to hire you, co-found something with you next, or fund you.”

Because of this density of founders in Silicon Valley, people feel safe to try all sorts of projects, because if they fail they can move on to the next project. In fact, in Silicon Valley, people value failure as having trained them in that experience. “We’re culturally tolerant of it,” Rosedale said. “We have an amazing tolerance of it. It’s not so much that the Bay Area breeds or attracts people who are uniquely insane, who are willing to take on this level of risk. It’s actually that, for the most part, for even the craziest among us, even if these really crazy ideas fail, you know you’re not going to starve to death. You’re not going to be completely desolate.”

Rosedale put it another way: “We huddle. We’re herd animals. We come here and we seek each other’s warmth and that works. We’re also, I believe, safe here. When you’re safe, it makes your more open and friendly. When you’re open and friendly, you share things with each other, like how to set up a server or how to get somebody who knows a lot of social media marketing stuff or how to find a developer. You share that information freely with each other,” he said.

“Even if you don’t share very much — and my hypothesis from studying this behaviorally is that actually we don’t do that much here — but that little bit that we do share in Silicon Valley adds up to a lot,” Rosedale said. “If you have a good idea in Lisbon, Portugal, if you have a good idea in Paris, France, you hide it from everyone else, right? You hide it from everyone else because it’s a precious gem and if that idea works, you’ll be successful. So what’s happening in San Francisco is, you have these strange confluences of people driven by the fact that people are both engaging in lot of projects and then willing to share and talk about them,” he said.

The implications of that have powered his new business.

“One of the things I’m fascinated by is the question of whether with Coffee and Power ([the name of Philip's newest company] we could build an app that will get you to do that anywhere.” Rosedale said. “Could we get people to connect at this level even in Omaha?” In other words, due to the density, or lack of it, in places such as Omaha, you’re looking to connect but not only with 20 people within its population of 100,000 — with Coffee and Power you’re connected to thousands of people around the world. “On top of that,” Rosedale said, “what if I can make it so that the 50 people at a time who are looking for team members in Omaha can find them? You can kind of see them if they’re near you. You can shrink the geography,” he said.

“I think the most important thing is not just finding them or talking to them. It’s not enough actually to break the ice, but what if you could see a bunch of little short statements about what they were doing yesterday and what they’re doing right now?”

In my next blog, I’ll talk to the CEO of TopCoder — the newest way to write software fast and cheap.

NOTE: Over the next year, I’m embarking on a BOLD mission — to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates’ personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world’s grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I’m going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I’ll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special “thank you,” and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

desktunes Music at your fingertips! ... Desktunes offers free music streaming within a simple set up and an elegant design. You can build your own playlists and view your ?ow Playing?track and album art. You?l have live radio at your fingertips with hundreds of radio stations. Keep your music on your desktop and download Desktunes now ?for free! click here Free music streaming - Stays on your desktop - Simple set up and elegant design - Build your own Playlists - Keep your Now Playing track visible

Peter Diamandis: Second Life: How a Virtual World Became a Reality

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In this blog, I’m introducing you to the work of Philip Rosedale, who set out on a very bold mission to create a virtual world accessible to the masses. How does one even think about doing something on this scale? What are the lessons learned? Enjoy!

I caught up with Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, a brilliant entrepreneur and a close friend, at Singularity University. Philip is one of the most expansive thinkers I know, with a passion for creating communities and motivating people to be effective and powerful entrepreneurs.

As a reader of this blog you already know my passion for “origin stories” for people’s companies, so finding out how and why Rosedale started one of the most ambitious Internet companies of the last decade was a real treat for me.

“I started doing electronics when I was a little kid, in the 5th or 6th grade, buying computer parts at a swap meet and writing my first programs,” Philip told me. “Simple things just blew my mind with respect to the sort of infinite simulation or combinatorial possibility inside the computer. My personal obsession from my childhood was that I just wanted to recreate reality inside the computer and then go in there,” Rosedale said.

Rosedale had studied physics at college and after graduation set out as an entrepreneur. “I had started a small company doing database inventory control, and decided to move the business up to San Francisco,” he said. “My timing for landing in Silicon Valley, at the center of the Internet, was perfect.”

“At that time I told my friends that I was eventually going to build a virtual world, but the systems weren’t up to speed,” continued Rosedale. “There was insufficient bandwidth and no 3D, even on desktop computers,” Rosedale said. “So I decided that I was going to have to lay low and work on something else entrepreneurial with this Internet ‘thing’ while I waited for the future to catch up,” Rosedale said.

Like anyone inspired by a bold idea, Rosedale had the confidence that he could eventually make it happen: “I was just so insanely motivated to build that place that I could see in my head.” He remained on high alert waiting for the signal that would allow him to take action and move ahead.

That signal came while Rosedale was working at Real Networks in Seattle — the Internet software company behind such companies as RealAudio, RealVideo, RealPlayer and RealDownloader. (Rosedale actually created Real Video.) While there he met Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Notes who later went on to become kind of a benefactor behind Second Life.

“It was the availability of broadband over DSL that re-launched my quest for creating my 3D virtual world,” said Rosedale. “When that bandwidth became available to the home, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can do it — I can build Second Life!’ You get that moment when you just feel like it can be done or, at least, it’s not too crazy to try and do it. In the next couple of weeks I packed up from Seattle and came back to San Francisco and started Second Life,” Rosedale said.

I asked Rosedale how he had raised money for such a crazy idea. His answer: “I didn’t.” Rosedale had made enough money when Real Networks went public that he was able to invest about $1 million of his own money in getting Second Life started.

“Unfortunately, even with my $1 million it wasn’t fundable,” he said. “If you have an idea as crazy and bold as Second Life I can guarantee you one thing: those traditional venture capitalists that are loaded with billions of dollars are not waiting to fund ideas like this,” he said.

Still, he convinced a few forward-thinkers (Mitch Kapor among them) to help fund Second Life, and now, some dozen years later, Second Life has more than 20 million registered users and remains a success. “The company’s about 175 employees in size today,” Philip said, “and it’s very profitable because those users on Second Life are able to do really cool things with it and they’re able to get value out of it. In turn, Second Life as a company is able to share in some of that as revenue. The GDP of Second Life today is somewhere between $600 million and $700 million a year in transactions between people. Most of those transactions are things like users building and selling clothing, furniture design, to other users — essentially people building a virtual world and then selling that virtual world to themselves.”

I asked Rosedale to summarize his lessons learned from creating Second Life. If you were advising an entrepreneur who wanted to do something as big and bold as Second Life, what are your top five pieces of advice — what to do and what not to do? Here are his answers:

1. Have real passion. “If a crystal ball told you that this was going to be huge and have a big impact on the world, but that in the end you would not make much money, would you still want to work on it? If no, stop,” said Rosedale.

2. Don’t raise very much money. “If your idea is really big, too much money will probably increase the risk of failure,” continued Rosedale. “Because there are many more ways to spend money to fail than win.”

3. Encourage people other than yourself to take genuine risk by your side. “Don’t shoulder the burden of proof alone.”

4. If the idea is really new and unique and big, other people will all think it is bad and is going to fail. “You will have to do it against the best advice of others — see point #1.”

5. Be good to people, both inside and outside the company. “Being bad is stressful and will occupy your mind. If you are working on something really amazing,” Rosedale reflected, “you will need that focus for the product and the company, not for worrying about people you’ve screwed.”

In my next blog, I’m going to continue my talk with Philip Rosedale, and detail his beliefs regarding the future of entrepreneurship and the workforce.

NOTE: Over the next year, I’m embarking on a BOLD mission — to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates’ personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world’s grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I’m going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I’ll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special “thank you,” and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

desktunes Music at your fingertips! ... Desktunes offers free music streaming within a simple set up and an elegant design. You can build your own playlists and view your ?ow Playing?track and album art. You?l have live radio at your fingertips with hundreds of radio stations. Keep your music on your desktop and download Desktunes now ?for free! click here Free music streaming - Stays on your desktop - Simple set up and elegant design - Build your own Playlists - Keep your Now Playing track visible

Peter Diamandis: 5 Steps to Cutting Costs Through Open Source: DIY Drones

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In this blog, I’m continuing my exploration of what Chris Anderson’s company DIY Drones has done in using open-source methods to create products that are exponentially less expensive to make.

After more than a decade as the editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson started the company of his dreams — a robotics manufacturing company called 3D Robotics, to produce the autonomous flying vehicles coming out of DIY Drones. When it came time to choose a co-founder and the CEO for his company, Chris didn’t go with an MIT Ph.D. or a Stanford professor. Instead, Anderson chose Jordi Muñoz, a 19-year-old high school student living in Tijuana, Mexico. How and why Anderson choose Muñoz is the opening theme of this blog. A subject I find fascinating and one that’s important for you to understand.

“If I had used the traditional construct for hiring when looking for someone to be co-founder and CEO of 3D Robotics,” Chris Anderson told me, “I probably would have gone to Stanford or MIT to look for people who had on their résumés the words ‘drone’ or maybe ‘company’ or possibly ‘college degree,’ maybe even ‘graduate degree.’ Instead, I ended up with a teenage high school student from Mexico. Now, it turns out that this teen, Jordi Muñoz, was the perfect person for the job. This job didn’t require a Ph.D.-quality drone engineer. The job involved creating an open-source robotics company in an unexplored space using low-cost resources and built on community participation. The people who went to MIT and Stanford are probably genius, but they probably didn’t know all those things.”

Today Jordi is a 26-year-old high school graduate living in San Diego, serving as CEO of a multimillion-dollar company. How he was hired, and the success of his role as CEO, reinforces the notion that the community brings the right person to the company. The community also brings a network of people who want to work for the company during their spare time, evening and weekends. These individuals aren’t motivated by the money; instead, they are doing it out of interest for the product being developed. These are people Chris could never afford to pay.

“Today, we have people who work for Apple, who are designing the iPhone by day and drones by night,” Chris said. “We have people who work for Google. We have people who work for NASA by day. By night they put in often as many hours working on our projects. We could not afford to hire them. They told me they’re unhireable. It’s weird: ‘You can’t pay us to work for you. However, we’ll work for you for free.’ That is a great concept. So, why do they do it? Is it generosity? No. Is it altruism? No. It’s enlightened self-interest — because they have a passion that for whatever reason isn’t tapped by their day job. And they’ve always wanted to do this.”

When Anderson started 3D Robotics, he looked at the Raven, a small military UAV made by AeroVironment, and wondered how he could take out at least 90 percent of the cost of creating it (or something very like it).

“I’m not sure we were even smart enough to know that such economies were possible,” Chris said. “We hadn’t actually seen a Raven or known its capabilities until a bit later. But at the end of the day, we took two to three orders of magnitude out of the price in military technology. Undercutting military procurement economics turns out to be not so hard.”

The military-grade UAV purchased by the Defense Department cost it between $300,000 to $400,000 for the full system. Chris’ company ended up building what’s known as a Quadcopter, similar to a Raven in overall capabilities, that costs about $300, or basically 1 percent of the cost of a similar UAV such as the Raven.

The secret was the community, and the use of open-sourcing.

During a recent trip to the EAA’s (Experimental Aircraft Association) Oshkosh AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Anderson found a whole host of eager hobbyists and enthusiasts interested in working on fun and innovative aerospace-related projects. “The world’s garages are full of people with lot of energy and passion, working on great ideas. What they need most is a better mechanism for collaboration,” he said.

“The real magic happens when you combine the kind of collaboration we enable at DIY Drones with what’s going on in electronics,” Anderson said, “with super-powerful chips and processors available for the hobbyist at a fraction of the cost of only a few years ago. The recognition that we have infinite processing, infinite sensing, wireless imaging at consumer electronics economies of scale — which is to say, cheap and available and easy to use — that’s the big breakthrough here. We’ve got a hammer that combines open-source innovation plus smartphone integration. So let’s start hitting things with a hammer.” Anderson plans to take on a number of other aerospace hardware projects where his approach can “demonetize” the cost, reducing it by 99 percent or more.

I asked Anderson to outline how a community can reduce the cost of product development by one or two orders of magnitude — what are the advantages and pitfalls. Here’s Anderson’s list of five areas to keep in mind.

Don’t charge for intellectual property. Making things open-source brings the cost down. Effectively the participants contribute their ideas and labor for free, and what you pay for is the hardware. “In electronics there’s what is called the bill of materials, which is the fundamental cost of the components,” Anderson explained. “Then there’s the final cost of the product. For something like military electronics for military autopilot, the bill of materials might be $100 and the autopilot, essentially the software, might cost $10,000.” Anderson continued, “There is a huge difference between the cost and the price. That difference is mostly labor in the form of R&D and intellectual property, plus the cost of doing business in the form of legal costs, sales cost and profit. The alternative, what we use with our open-source approach of DIY Drones and 3D Robotics, is to price the final products at 2.6 times the bill of materials. That 2.6 number is a 140 percent margin for the wholesaler — that’s the people who make it — and another 40 percent margin for the retailer. That’s the distributors who ultimately sell. That’s fair. You can build a business on a 40 percent margin.”
Be prepared to be ripped off. “The Chinese cloned us in seven days, Chris said. “We put in tens of thousands of dollars of our own R&D cost (R&D cost is not zero, but is still a lot lower than the military invests in it). We did all the work and then they just took our files and cloned us.”
Despite theft from some quarters, the crowd will make your product better. “Along with cloning, though, what’s going to happen is someone else is going to take your files and say, ‘I could have done that better,’” Chris said. “And they’re going to modify it and they’re going to do a derivative design and then they’re going to either sell that or send it back and say, ‘You should do this instead.’ That’s what’s great.”
Open-source leads to regulatory breaks. Many people who try to do big bold things in the world find out it’s not about the money or the technology: It’s about the regulatory hurdles that will try and stop you. “If you are Lockheed Martin or Boeing or anybody else and you want to create an autopilot, first of all you have to get it certified, you have to go through this long approval process, through the military procurement chain,” Chris said. “You’re not allowed to test it in the air unless you have an approval from the FAA — which governs unmanned vehicle use in the national aerospace. If, on the other hand, you’re a kid, an amateur, there’s an exemption for you and you can fly it in the park all day. Amateur use, i.e., non-commercial use, is a kind of safe zone. By and large, open-source qualifies as public domain, so the active technology being created free by the Internet and shared by the Internet means it’s exempted.” Chris Anderson went on to explain how this is also true for State Department ITAR regulations and even FCC regulations.
By giving it away for free, liability issues evaporate. “It turns out if you’re shipping to end users, to consumers, you have to get FCC certification,” Chris said. “If you’re shipping to developers, you don’t. It’s the last person who touches the product before it ends up in a blister pack that has to get it certified. As long as you’re shipping to other DIYers, you’re exempt from that. Open-source is a get-out-of-jail-free card for the gnarly barriers to entry that have slowed innovation so far,” Chris said. “By the way, big military industrial companies love regulation. The more rules, the better, because they’ve got an army of lawyers.”

Basically, Chris said, open-source hardware is the “hammer” to break open innovation of all sorts. “Right now the technology is available. You can do it. With this hammer called open-source hardware, people are going to reverse engineer things. What’s going to happen is that the first one is going to suck. But it was open and DIY, and that’s cool enough. The next one’s going to suck less. They’re going to find a way to do something totally cool and cheap.”

In my next blog, I’m going to introduce you to my friend Philip Rosedale, a brilliant entrepreneur and the creator of Second Life, who has come up with ways for entrepreneurs to change the way people think about barriers and to change the they think about work.

NOTE: Over the next year, I’m embarking on a BOLD mission — to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates’ personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world’s grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I’m going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I’ll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special “thank you,” and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

desktunes Music at your fingertips! ... Desktunes offers free music streaming within a simple set up and an elegant design. You can build your own playlists and view your ?ow Playing?track and album art. You?l have live radio at your fingertips with hundreds of radio stations. Keep your music on your desktop and download Desktunes now ?for free! click here Free music streaming - Stays on your desktop - Simple set up and elegant design - Build your own Playlists - Keep your Now Playing track visible

Peter Diamandis: The DIY Revolution — How to Remove 99 Percent of the Cost from Your Product

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In this blog, I’m introducing you to one of the premier do-it-yourself sites out there, Chris Anderson’s DIY Drones, and how his kind of open-source innovation is changing the way products are created.

I’m a huge fan of Chris Anderson’s DIY Drones, and how his model of creating a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) community allows him (and YOU) to be surrounded by the smartest people around the world to help implement a dream.

Anderson has been the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and, not surprisingly, something of a geek dad (Note: He stepped down at the end of 2012 to concentrate on his new business and to write his next book). In 2008, he decided to spend the weekend with his kids building a LEGO Mindstorms robot and a remote-control airplane. But nothing went as planned. The robots bored the kids — “Dad, where are the lasers?” — and the airplane crashed into a tree right out of the gate. While Anderson was cleaning up the wreckage, he began wondering what would happen if he used the LEGO autopilot to fly the plane. His kids thought the idea was cool — for about four hours — but Anderson was hooked. “I didn’t know anything about the subject,” he says, “but I recognized that I could buy a gyro from LEGO for $20 and turn it into an autopilot that my nine-year-old could program. That was mind-blowing. Equally amazing was the fact that an autonomous flying aircraft is on the Department of Commerce’s export-control restrictions list — so my nine-year-old had just weaponized LEGO.”

Curious to learn more, Anderson started a nonprofit online community called DIY Drones. In the beginning, the projects were simple, but as his community grew (quickly surpassing 10,000 members), so did its ambition. The cheapest military-grade unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on the market is the Raven. Built by AeroVironment, this drone retails for $35,000, with the full system for $250,000. One of DIY Drones’ first major projects was an attempt to build an autonomous flying platform with 90 percent of Raven’s functionality at a radically reduced price. The members wrote and tested software, designed and tested hardware, and ended up with the QuadCopter. It was an impressive feat. In less than a year, and with almost no development costs, they created a homebrew drone with 90 percent of the Raven’s functionality for just $300 — literally 1 percent of the military’s price. Nor was this a one-off demonstration. The DIY Drones community has developed 100 different products in the same way, each in under a year, for essentially zero out-of-pocket development cost.

I invited Chris Anderson to Singularity University to deliver a lecture and be interviewed for this blog. First and foremost on my mind was the question about how one goes about creating a community and securing the talent to do something as incredible as DIY Drones.

“Bill Joy’s famous quote, ‘Whoever you are, the smartest people in the world don’t work for you’ is as valid as ever,” Anderson said. “This was a paradox of 20th-century management. The reason companies were created in the first place was to minimize transaction costs through a shared vision and shared responsibility. You hire people and you put them under one roof and you give them roles and responsibilities so that you can get things done. The consequences of this approach, of course, means that you needed to first find the people, hire them, use some filter to determine whether they were sufficiently qualified. We end up focused on people’s ‘credentials.’ The reality is that most of the world’s smartest people don’t have the right credentials,” he said.

“They don’t speak the right language. They didn’t grow up in the right country. They didn’t go to the right university. They don’t know about you and you don’t know about them. They’re not available, they already have a job. All of these issues are barriers to putting them under one roof to solve the employment equation of 20th-century management,” he said. “We now have an alternative to this approach. The alternative is building a team in public: If you build communities first and open source them, you don’t have to find the right people. They find you.”

Anderson started the DIY Drones community fueled by his enthusiasm around what he had discovered and what he hoped to do. Chief among his learning on making the community work was his willingness to be open, authentic and intimate. “I created a social network,” he said, “this simple act of chronicling my journey of discovery in this field I knew nothing about, doing it in public on a site that invited other people to participate. The simple act of choosing to share my ignorance, my discoveries and be willing to be stupid in public invited other people to say, ‘I’ve been wondering that too, and here’s an answer.’ If you’re stupid, then people will help you, but if you act super-smart, people will be scared to help you.”

This openness invites openness. “It’s intimacy, it’s authenticity, it’s willingness to ask dumb questions in public,” Anderson said. “That simple lowering of the barrier to entry along with things like Arduino [the open-source electronics prototyping platform], which was the platform we ended up choosing, allowed people to see that it was really easy to get started.”

DIY Drones now has 30,000 members, with 1.5 million pageviews a month. Not large by media standards, “but big by robotic standards,” Anderson said. The site offers kits for UAV copters, planes and more.

Chris built the site not by emphasizing its high-tech credentials, but by opening it up to innovation from the crowd. By choosing to work with Arduino, which offers accessibility but not the highest-tech products, Anderson was mocked at first. But in the end, he said, that accessibility was what was important. “It’s easy to pick up, hard to master — and we bet on social rather than technology,” allowing the community to come back with better ideas for using it.

“We bet that the community-accessibility aspects of Arduino would ultimately overwhelm any of the kind of technical specs,” he said. “That proved out to be right. Today we have one of the highest-performing autopilots out there with one of the lowest-performing hardware platforms. What does that tell you? It tells you that smart people and great algorithms at the end of the day are the most important things. It’s not about your clock speed. It’s about the brains and the vision and the talents that went into the crowd.”

So how do you use a community to drive innovation in a new product? Here are Chris Anderson’s top three lessons learned:

Be open in everything. “There was so much to learn, and everything I learned I’d share because I didn’t have any particular pride in what I was supposed to know,” Anderson said. “Everybody had permission to post, and we had guidelines. Over time, others started following the guide, the same style and format, and then people started working on projects together and posting videos of those. They shared.”
Use version control. In other words, make it understandable. “The first thing we realized is that the secret to open source is two words: version control,” Anderson said. “Sharing is necessary but not sufficient. You need to share in a way that invites other people to participate. Until you commit something to a version-control system (i.e., a format where people understand how you’re documenting it, where changes can be made, tracked and reverted to if they’re wrong), it never takes off.”
Encourage participation. “We call it architecture participation,” Anderson said. “Architecture participation is like a great videogame: easy to start, hard to master. Architecture participation means that everybody sees this project and says there’s something for me to do, and whether that something is simple as correcting a typo in the documentation or submitting an incredible algorithm they’ve been working on for five years, you just find a way to plug it right into the existing architecture. It’s hard,” Anderson added. “It requires things that engineers don’t like to do, such as documentation, clear comments, being transparent about the plan, sharing stuff before it’s ready. That’s the hardest thing: getting people to share stuff before it’s done. Nothing good has ever happened by waiting until it’s done. It happens by putting it out there when you’re embarrassed about it and having people help you finish it.”

In my next blog, I’m going to continue exploring Chris Anderson’s DIY Drones. We’ll discuss how his model of creating a DIY community has also developed into new ways of hiring talented people, and of getting super-talented people to work for free.

NOTE: Over the next year, I’m embarking on a BOLD mission — to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates’ personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world’s grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I’m going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I’ll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special “thank you,” and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.

Peter Diamandis: An X PRIZE for Jobs: Can We Radically Reinvent How We Create, Finance and Find Jobs in America?

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We are living in extraordinary times, where technology is allowing small teams of individuals to accomplish what were once only the province of governments. Empowered by smart phones, the internet, artificial intelligence, ubiquitous networks, cloud computing, robotics and digital manufacturing, small teams are building platforms and companies that are touching the lives of billions, and solving problems once solely the domain of the public sector.

Burt Rutan and a small team of 30 engineers built a spaceship able to fly twice into space within two weeks; the winners of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X PRIZE quadrupled the rate of cleaning up oil spills on the ocean surface; an area where a trillion dollar industry had failed to make improvements in 20 years. Three co-founders of Kickstarter built a crowd funding platform that will raise $150 million by the end of 2012, providing more funding than the National Endowment for the Arts. The two co-founders of Kiva created a global lending platform that has made more than $330 million dollars in loans to 817,000 borrowers with little or no collateral and achieved a 99 percent repayment rate.

How we solve today’s problems and who solves them are both changing in a dramatic fashion and this is a very good thing. We have a lot of challenges and one of them (the topic of this blog) is job creation in America. You know the stats: Over 20 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; More than 50 percent of our recent college and high school grads fall into this category. At the same time we have 3 million jobs that aren’t being filled because applicants don’t have the proper training.

Who is going to solve this problem? Government? Perhaps, but frankly, I’d also like the smartest most passionate thinkers and entrepreneurs across our great nation all competing to beat this problem into submission. I’d love to have a lot of ideas tried in parallel with the hope of some true breakthroughs.

The challenge is that the day before something is truly a breakthrough it’s a crazy idea. And crazy ideas are very risky to attempt. If governments try and fail, there’s a congressional investigation. If a company fails, its stock price can take a hit and executive compensation follows next. One answer to this conundrum is incentive competitions. Put up a prize with an audacious goal, have lots of teams (large and small) attempt to solve it and only pay the winner in success.

Recently, an extraordinary organization called the Robin Hood Foundation raised $19 million to develop, launch and operate a series of Robin Hood X PRIZEs to combat poverty in New York, with the hope that what we learn in New York might be replicated in cities throughout the U.S. What prizes we develop and launch is yet to be determined. The goal is to aim at the root causes of poverty. Issues like education and literacy, reducing high school and college dropout rates, job skills training, and many others.

This blog is a request to crowd-source ideas for a series of Jobs X PRIZEs. My question to you is the following: What should the competition look like? What are the rules?

A great incentive competition (what we call an X PRIZE) has rules that are clear, measurable and objective.

In 1919 to promote aviation, Raymond Orteig offered up25,000 (now worth about5M) for the first person to fly from New York to Paris (won by Charles Lindberg). The Orteig Prize inspired nine teams to spend400,000 in their efforts and launched today’s500 billion aviation industry. Any person could enter, and the only thing being measured was where they took off and where they landed.

In 1996 to stimulate a vibrant commercial spaceflight industry, the X PRIZE announced the10 million Ansari X PRIZE offered to the first team to build a private spaceship able to launch 3 adults to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles) altitude twice in two weeks. This competition attracted 26 teams from 7 countries who spent100 million pursuing the goal. The winning spaceship, built by Burt Rutan and funded by Paul Allen, won the competition on October 4th, 2004 and lead to the creation of Virgin Galactic which is now selling seats on sub-orbital flights into space. Any non-government team could enter, and what was measured was the altitude reached, the days between flights and the number of people the ship could carry.

Given these as examples, what would your rules be for an X PRIZE intended to incentivize new ways to create, finance and find Jobs in America?

Here’s a quick primer in prize creation: In designing an X PRIZE, you’ll need to answer the following seven questions.

How much is the prize purse?

What’s the name of your proposed prize?

Who can compete? Who are the teams? (Individuals, companies, high schools, church groups, anyone?)

What specifically (in a clear, measurable and objective fashion) does the winning team need to achieve?

What exactly are you measuring? How do you measure it in a way that is easy and in which results can’t be falsified (i.e. no cheating!).

How long would the competition run for? Is the first to achieve this? Or the team that achieves the highest score in a set amount of time?

Can you imagine a telegenic finish that generates publicity as teams demonstrate their winning solution?

If you have ideas for the rules around a Jobs X PRIZE, we would LOVE to have you submit them here. This is a special Prize Submission form created jointly by the Huffington Post and X PRIZE to get your ideas. The best ideas may be used for a future set of Jobs X PRIZEs.

To read more from the X PRIZE Foundation on The Huffington Post, visit their blog archive here.

Martin Ford: Will Robots and Automation Make Human Workers Obsolete?

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PBS News Hour recently had a special on the main topic I’ve been writing about here on The Huffington Post and elsewhere: unemployment and inequality caused by technology and, in particular, automation.

You can watch the video below:

The video includes input from two very prominent technology futurists: Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. Kurzweil is author of the book (and forthcoming movie) The Singularity Is Near and believes we’re headed for a future where humans and machines merge (sort of like the Borg on Star Trek, but hopefully better-looking). Peter Diamandis is one of the leaders of the personal space flight industry and chairman of Singularity University, which offers graduate courses in futuristic technologies and their implications.

Both Kurzweil and Diamandis are strong believers (and advocates for) the so-called “technological singularity.” The singularity is a future event in which technological progress begins moving at an incomprehensibly rapid rate. Things would be changing so fast that humans wouldn’t be able to understand or follow the progress. Most people who believe in the singularity (singularians) associate it with the development of true artificial intelligence. Kurzweil, for example, believes that we’ll build the first truly intelligent machines by 2029, and then the singularity will follow at around the year 2045.

While all this may seem a bit far-fetched, the singularity and proponents like Kurzweil and Diamandis have a strong following among the technology elite — and in particular among Silicon Valley billionaires. People like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as Facebook investor Peter Thiel, have all been associated with the idea.

In the video above, Ray Kurzweil is asked about the possibility of a “digital divide” — meaning that only a small percentage of the population is able to take advantage of new technologies, even as traditional employment opportunities are destroyed. Kurzweil seems to argue that we won’t have a problem, because these new technologies will be affordable and widely available (he gives the example of cellphones). A little later in the video Diamandis makes essentially the same point.

These views strike me as both unrealistic and elitist. There is little evidence to suggest that most average people are going to be able to parlay access to a cellphone, social media, or other personal technologies into a livable income. Even among the minority of people who actually have the necessary skills and training, there is a strong element of luck associated with the success of any entrepreneurial activity. Most new businesses of any type fail. Assuming that a huge percentage (perhaps most) of the population will someday generate a meaningful income by independently leveraging technology is really quite a stretch.

A second problem with techno-optimists like Kurzweil and Diamandis is their near-exclusive focus on the cost side of technology. Many technologists believe that advancing technology and increased automation are likely to drive down costs and possibly make most products and services far more affordable. At the extreme, some techno-optimists believe in the promise of a “post-scarcity” economy. Even if we go along with that — and there are certainly powerful opposing arguments based on energy and resource depletion and environmental degradation — simply making “stuff” cheaper is not an adequate solution.

Imagine for a moment that you were living in the year 1900. Suppose you could look through a time portal and see the world of 2012. You might well suppose that a “post-scarcity” world had already been realized, given the far higher living standards that average people now enjoy. On the other hand, if you got a look at 2012 prices (as opposed to what you were used to in 1900), you certainly wouldn’t feel that things had become more affordable!

The reality, of course, is that prices have increased dramatically in nominal terms since 1900 — but average incomes have increased even more. The average U.S. worker in 1900 earned just $438 per year. Over the past 112 years, incomes have increased dramatically in real terms (after adjusting for inflation), leaving nearly everyone better off, even as prices have increased.

The problem is that if, rather than a period of 112 years, we look at just the last 30 years — say since the mid 1980s — the story is very different. Incomes (wages) for most average workers have been completely stagnant in real terms; after adjusting for inflation, most workers have made little or any progress. And for a number of big-ticket items — like health care, housing, and education — the situation has actually worsened significantly for most Americans.

So will making all kinds of stuff cheaper, even as incomes continue to stagnate and even fall, solve our problems? No, it will not. If we actually had a situation where prices for nearly everything fell while wages likewise fell and unemployment increased, that would be deflation. You won’t find many economists who would advocate long-term deflation as a good strategy for the future.

Deflation destroys the incentive to invest in the future and, if prolonged, would likely slow the pace of innovation. The problem with deflation is that while incomes, prices, and asset values may well fall, debts do not deflate. The result would be widespread insolvency, potentially catastrophic financial crises, and lower living standards for virtually everyone.

The true challenge we face in the future is really about incomes. As technology and globalization advance, how do we get incomes for the majority of the population to continue increasing in real terms? This has been the historical path to prosperity, and we have to figure out how to maintain that trend going forward. One of the main ideas I focus on in my book The Lights in the Tunnel is that incomes power consumers — and consumers ultimately power the economy.

If we can’t find a way to maintain, and even increase, real incomes for the majority of our population, broad-based prosperity will become increasingly elusive.

See also this post on my EconFuture blog: “

Arianna Huffington: The Inspirationals: Jeff Skoll, Doubling Down on the Things That Work

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The Edmonton Journal recently called Jeff Skoll “the greatest Canadian you’ve never heard of.” And during his TED Talk in 2007, he joked, “I’ve actually been waiting by the phone for a call from TED for years.” But in fact, Jeff Skoll, beyond being the first president of eBay, has been a pioneer in the world of cutting edge philanthropy with his Skoll Global Threats Fund, confronting the greatest dangers our world faces today; with Participant Media, which has produced more than 30 movies, including Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth, Good Night and Good Luck and Waiting for ‘Superman’; and with the Skoll World Forum, which I attended in March in Oxford.

Today, he is being presented with Canada’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Canada, for his wide-ranging philanthropic work. The Order, which will be presented by Governor General David Johnston, carries the motto Desiderantes Meliorem Patriam (“They desire a better country”).

It’s a richly deserved honor. Through his network of organizations designed to have a powerful impact on our world, he’s working to create the critical mass necessary to bring about the changes our world so desperately needs. His résumé is at once remarkably varied and obsessively single-minded. His vision is simple and vast at the same time: to use all the tools at his disposal to change the world.

Skoll made his mark, and his fortune, as an online entrepreneur. In their 2011 book Abundance, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler identified Skoll as one of a rising class of “technophilanthropists” — tech entrepreneurs who made their money before the age of 40 and are now turning their attention and resources to solving the world’s biggest problems.

The theme of this year’s Skoll World Forum was “Flux,” which Jeff calls “the one constant” in our ever-changing world. Fortunately, he is helping to establish another constant: the social entrepreneurs achieving measurable results in solving heretofore intractable problems all across the globe. His Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship is like a R&D lab for empathy, a super-collider for generating the kind of urgency that is so tragically absent among our political leaders. As Stephan Chambers, chairman of the Skoll Centre, put it during this year’s Forum: “I have cried every day this week. Remember as I tell you this, that I’m male. And British. And from Oxford.”

So, the Order of Canada’s motto, “They desire a better country,” fits Skoll, but only to a degree. He has gone far beyond merely desiring a better country, and indeed a better world, to empowering people to achieve solutions everywhere in the world.

What follows is a transcript of my interview with Jeff Skoll, a man who fits perfectly in our Inspirationals series, combining as he does an audacious vision, an innovative mind, and a deeply empathetic heart.

Why don’t we start with your latest tweet, about your visit with Bill Gates to talk about a new movie about education.

We’re actually thinking of doing a project with Davis Guggenheim, who directed Waiting for ‘Superman’. The idea would be to do a TV special about great teachers and what makes teachers great. The Gates Foundation is really a great partner for this sort of thing, given their emphasis on education. At Participant, when there’s a project we’re passionate about, we’re going to do it!

That reminds me of what you said in your introductory remarks at the Skoll World Forum, “When anyone tells me I can’t do something, I stop listening.” Do you remember the last time somebody told you you couldn’t do something?

It seems to happen every time I start a new organization. When I started Participant, there was a lot of resistance. I heard all the silly quotes, like “the streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you who come to town and try to make movies.” I just wanted to make good quality films that were about something and not worry so much about whether they were successful commercially or not. And they’ve done just fine commercially — clearly there is an audience for this kind of thing.

The other one is when I started the Skoll Global Threats Fund. Its five big issues are climate change, Middle East change, nukes, pandemics and water. People often roll their eyes when they hear about those issues, because they are really big. And I think that’s the biggest challenge I’ve ever tried to tackle. And the jury is out on how well we’re doing on any of these things. But when you have the opportunity to make a difference — how many people are in the position to be able to make a difference? I’m lucky enough to be in a position to at least try.

Of course, you put yourself in that position, because there are many successful people who don’t choose to take the opportunity to make a difference. In your 2010 speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, you told the graduates, “And, unlike the successful business leaders of your parents’ generation, you won’t have to wait until you retire to think about giving back, getting involved in your community or philanthropy.”

I think that’s absolutely true. I think it’s important to get started early. Because early on you make mistakes. And you learn from those mistakes and then you can double down on the things that work.

When I started the Skoll Foundation, I ran it myself for a couple of years, but didn’t really have a clear focus about what we were doing. We made some grants that didn’t necessarily work out. But it was through that that we began to see that there were certain kinds of grantees that were, in fact, highly successful, highly leveraged, with a business model. These turned out to be social entrepreneurs. If it weren’t for those two or three years of trial and error, we might not have found our niche.

I think what you’ve stressed again and again is a sense of urgency — that this is the time to really prioritize giving back. And interestingly enough this is an area where you and Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates agree.

I was just at the second annual Giving Pledge gathering, which Warren and Bill and Melinda started. If nothing else, last year there were 40 or 50 or so pledgers — almost entirely old white men who are self-made. We had a breakout session during the gathering and we had four options: education, health, being a more effective philanthropist, and international giving. People self-selected into which groups they wanted to go to. Of the 40 or 50 pledgers, only four selected international giving — me, Bill Gates and a couple of others. Everybody else was all about health and education.

I think for the older generation, they tend to focus more on traditional things, like putting up a wing in a hospital or doing health research or helping fund new kinds of schools. All those things are great, but for the younger generation I think there’s more of an inclination to look more globally.

And at the same time, you are looking at the problems in the U.S., including growing unemployment and challenges facing young people. Are you looking to do more in this country?

In large part, on the movie side of things we aim at issues where the U.S. can make a difference, whether it’s climate change or nuclear weapons or water or pandemic preparation. Participant is growing to be an international company. We’ve just done our first Spanish language movie. We did a film set in Iran last year, in Farsi. But for the most part we’re an LA-based production company, trying to reach a western audience first and foremost.

On the social entrepreneur side, there’s a good balance. Most of our teams are based in the U.S. but do their work outside the U.S. We have a documentary coming out relatively soon, hopefully this summer, that’s like Waiting for ‘Superman’, only about hunger. It shows that there are about 80 million people in the country who are hungry or obese — two different sides of the same coin, with poverty at the base.

The movies and documentaries you’re making in a way take you back to your childhood ambition of being a writer. Here you are, being a storyteller, but also an impresario, bringing together other storytellers to amplify what you want to communicate. Do you sometimes think you are, in a very roundabout way, actually fulfilling an early dream?

As a kid, I didn’t tell these stories — I didn’t know how — but I wanted to be involved in the big issues. I figured storytelling was the best way to get people engaged. I didn’t think it was the best way to make a living, but I always pursued a journalistic sideline. For example, I was editor of my school’s newspaper as an undergrad and at Stanford.

For me eBay was a step on the road. I thought it would be a learning opportunity, after which I would go on to start my next company. And hopefully at that point I would have enough money to start writing all these stories. Well, eBay turned out to be a much bigger blessing than I could have imagined. And I thought, rather than writing these stories myself — and probably fairly poorly — I could hire writers and turn them into film and TV. So Participant is the unexpected outgrowth of the path I started on.

I see Participant as just the knee of the curve. We do six to eight movies a year. We have a digital division that does short-form video. We’ll soon have a TV division, and, knock on wood, we’ll be buying a TV channel. So that opens a whole new way to reach people with entertainment that inspires.

You are really hoping to help find solutions for every major social problem. Especially with the Skoll Global Threats Fund. Does one threat in particular keep you awake at night?

The one that keeps me up for sure is the Middle East. Because I think things are so tenuous over there. To address it, the strategy that we’ve been trying to use, with social entrepreneurs, is providing job growth for youth.

Have you ever had an imaginary conversation with a young Jeff and thought about what he would say about all you’ve created — Participant, Skoll Foundation, the World Forum, the Global Threats Fund?

The young Jeff wouldn’t have had a clue, that’s for sure. Growing up in a middle-class family in Canada, I really didn’t know much about philanthropy, running a company, or starting companies.

We actually had an interesting exercise a teacher had us do in high school. He asked us what you wanted written on your tombstone and then work backward from there. I found that such a powerful exercise because it helped clarify the path that I wanted to take with my life. Which again, was to get involved with the big issues in the world. And there were other things, like having a good family life and all that kind of stuff. But whenever I’ve come to a fork in the road, going back to that master plan of knowing what you want to be doing has been a very powerful metaphor.

I didn’t really know that my path would lead through things like eBay and the Skoll Foundation and Participant, but I did always have the uber goal of trying to find these big issues and make a difference. And I don’t really know what the future holds as well. For all the things we’re doing, I don’t know that it’s enough. The social entrepreneurs are great and making a difference in the world. The movies are doing well and having an impact. But there are still major problems in the world. I don’t know what’s next.

I’ve always avoided politics. In Canada growing up we never talked politics. In America it’s a much different thing. But maybe that’s the next frontier — to really engage politically — because that ultimately is where the power is held.

Would you ever consider engaging to the point of running for office?

Oh dear, no. I admire people who have done so. I think it’s so brave to run for public office — you’re just putting yourself out there and opening your life completely for scrutiny. I admire people who do run for office and do a good job. It’s really hard. So maybe the next frontier is figuring out how to have a political environment that isn’t so corrosive and toxic.

As you are dealing everyday with all the threats and dangers that we are facing, how do you keep your faith and sense of optimism and possibility?

When I think of the major threats in the world, long term, we do have the time and the ability to solve them — even the most intractable threats. Think about nuclear weapons and how horrible it is that there are so many of them around the world. And yet none of them have been used since 1945.

And at the Global Threats Fund, we’re working on something to bring virus pandemic detection down to about 72 hours. So if you can catch it at that point through all these detection labs we’re building around the world, that’s pretty optimistic.

One of the quotes I want to ask you about is from your TED Talk. You said that in your youth you read Ayn Rand and James Michener: “Their stories made the world seem a very small and interconnected place. And it struck me that if I could write stories that were about this world being small and interconnected, maybe I could get people interested in the issues that affected us all, and engage them to make a difference.” The fact that these writers made the world seem smaller and interconnected clearly resonated with you. Is that the way to help us feel we can actually make a difference?

I think of it as empowered self-enlightenment. In the past, if there was an earthquake in China or Chile, people wouldn’t know about it until a letter arrived by ship, or some other way, a year later. But now, anything that happens anywhere in the world we know about almost instantly.

I’m on the board of an organization called the National Center for Arts and Technology, run by Bill Strickland, a social entrepreneur who was in Waiting for ‘Superman’. Bill has built these tremendous centers in these schools. The same kids that are graduating at 30 percent rates in the local high schools are graduating at 90/95 percent rates in his programs. I’ve been on the board, working with him since 1999. At one point he asked me, why do you care? You don’t live in those neighborhoods. It’s because these neighborhoods affect everybody, whether it’s crimes or poverty or drugs or prison populations. We’re all better off if these neighborhoods are better off.

Let’s end on something personal. You’ve said that when you were 14, and your dad came home and announced that he had cancer, that was a pivotal moment in your life. How do you bring together this personal prioritizing that became so important, when your father told you he was afraid he hadn’t done the things he had wanted to with his life, with that sense of our own self-enlightenment?

When that happened to my dad, it was a real call to action to get started on doing all the things I felt could make a difference in the world. The flip side, on a more personal note, is that I haven’t had kids yet. Most of my friends by now have multiple kids, or have been divorced twice. But I’ve never been married. So in terms of a personal thing, that’s become my most important personal goal.

But your dad is with us? Is he living in Canada?

My parents are alive and well and they’re living in Las Vegas. And they’re still together, 54 years.

That must be very good to have in your past, something I definitely didn’t have. My parents separated early and I ended up getting divorced.

Well, it seems to be the norm. All I can say is we all make our mistakes, and hopefully they pass quickly and we learn from them.

Now, having children, and caring for your personal life is up there on your list of priorities.

It certainly is. I used to work crazy hours, night and day. And now I’ve mellowed a bit and I’m trying to have a little more fun and, god willing, maybe even go for my first vacation in a few years.

But when you take a vacation, can you actually disconnect completely?

Oh, that would make me very nervous.

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